IBC 2017: ChyronHego TRACAB delivers player tracking for Microsoft Sports Performance Platform
ChyronHego announced that its TRACAB image-based tracking system has been chosen as one of the anchor technologies in Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform — a Microsoft Garage project. Announced earlier this year at the Hashtag Sports conference, Sports Performance Platform is a cloud-based sports-analytics platform that provides professional sports teams, leagues, and organizations with a solution to help both athletes and teams make better, faster, and more data-driven decisions. It is Microsoft’s platform to enable predictive analytics within the sports industry.
TRACAB uses advanced optical tracking and image-processing technologies to determine the position of all moving objects in the field of play — including players, referees, assistant referees, and the ball. The result is a live data feed that contains the X, Y, and Z positional coordinates for each identified object. The data can then be streamed in an open format to a multitude of visualization platforms, such as broadcast graphics systems and online or mobile platforms, and it can also be used to prepare comprehensive sets of performance statistics for sports analysts.
“Inclusion in the Microsoft Sports Performance Platform is just one more fantastic validation of our TRACAB technology, which has been deployed by many of Europe’s top sports organizations and is now rapidly expanding in the Americas as well,” says Mark Bowden, head of sports product management at ChyronHego. “Sports Performance Platform will give us an important tool for expanding TRACAB’s installed base, especially since it demonstrates that the solution is much more than just a data-collection tool — it’s now also a path for visualizing and interrogating the data in powerful and meaningful ways.”
Steve Fox, principal software engineer for Microsoft Corp., said, “ChyronHego’s TRACAB not only collects and organizes critical data in real time but makes it readily available for presentation so that coaches and teams can see and predict trends and patterns. It’s solutions like this that will help us provide our customers a deeper and richer set of capabilities.”